[Using Sakai] Request to institutions running Sakai 2.9

[Shawn Miller]

Nancy - 

Having a shared gallery or some form of shared guest access to other institutions running 2.9 would have saved us some time as well. To be honest, messing around with developing and tweaking new skins became the most time consuming and tedious part of our entire upgrade (save a few bugs and tweaks here and there). 

We're fortunate to have a great designer on our staff - but even he was somewhat baffled at times by the Sakai CSS. In the end, we managed. For a short time, we thought about pursuing the neo-examp-u style skins (centering Sakai on top of a tiled image) - but ended up ditching it for fear of iframed integrations getting jumbled if they were compressed. We also tried going with a much shorter (narrower?) header for our default - more 'Facebook-y' - but in the end opted to go with a taller header that would display the Duke logo more clearly and be less jarring for our users.

Here's a link to a public folder with screenshots of our current skins (we just upgraded to 2.9.1 this weekend!)
https://sakai.duke.edu/x/mA8iuR

We offer some of our professional schools custom skins - those are included above as well. Most people get the 'Duke Default.' 

On a related note - I'd also be interested in knowing if anyone has tweaked the overall styling of the Sakai syllabus and/or Lessons to make them look better. For one thing - the lack of a set width for content drives some of our faculty crazy (those who don't know how to add tables or width attributes to keep their content from shooting all the way across the screen).

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Shawn J. Miller
Head, eLearning Tools and Strategy
Center for Instructional Technology
 
http://cit.duke.edu/about/staff/miller/
shawn.miller at duke.edu
http://twitter.com/shawnj55 or @shawnj55